Studies indicate that over 60% of network outages are caused by mistakes made by users whilst changing network element configurations. This is exacerbated by the syntactically complex command-line interfaces used by many network elements. Existing approaches to reducing user error include: provision of help text within the interface itself; auto-completion of commands as the user types on the interface; and restriction of the set of commands which the user may issue based on their security permissions. However, none of these approaches is complete and errors are still very common, so additional mechanisms which might further reduce the number of mistakes are required.
An example network configuration manager is the IBM Tivoli Netcool Configuration Manager (ITNCM) (IBM, Tivoli, and Netcool are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation). The function of the ITNCM application is to allow users to configure network elements easily, reliably, and repeatedly. The mechanisms which ITNCM uses to achieve this are primarily built around the use of a model of the device configuration interface. The described method and system build upon and extend existing network configuration managers such as ITNCM.
A network element is a device which forms part of a communications network. Every network element has a configuration, which is a series of internally-held settings that influence how it operates. The configuration usually has a human-readable representation which the device can provide on demand, often as plain text. The network element also has a configuration interface, which is a mechanism by which the configuration can be altered, often by way of plain text commands issued on a command-line interface (CLI). In order to set up and manage a network element, the human operator must understand how commands entered on the configuration interface act to influence the configuration.
The ITNCM system contains a library of models for different devices (each model is specific to a type or family of devices from one vendor). The model has syntactic, behavioural, and rendering aspects. The existing ITNCM process retrieves the current configuration from the device, and using the syntactic part of the model, it converts the native configuration into an internal representation of the configuration (an extended markup language (XML) structure) for easier manipulation within the application. The rendering aspects of the model are used by the graphical user interface (GUI) of the system to display the configuration to the user with appropriate annotations such as a visual indication of the allowable range for a parameter. The user can make changes to the configuration by manipulating the GUI representation or by applying a previously saved configuration template, and then request that change to be applied to the device. Using the syntactic and behavioural aspects of the model, ITNCM converts the changes that have been applied to the internal representation of the configuration into a series of commands that can be issued to the device, in order to influence its configuration to match the ITNCM internal representation.
It is desirable to reduce the potential for human error in configuring a device by restricting the ways in which certain users can change device configurations—stopping less experienced network engineers from issuing the potentially most destructive commands. This can be achieved today in ITNCM by blocking access to certain parts of the configuration when it is rendered on the GUI. However, in customer engagements it has been found that network engineers also demand access directly to the command line interface (CLI).
ITNCM provides command line access by way of an integrated device terminal (IDT), within which there is a mechanism to restrict the commands that a user can submit to a device. However, this is based on simplistic text string matching to block commands, and puts virtually all the work to define appropriate text filters onto the ITNCM administrator. The current approach requires the user to have detailed knowledge of the command syntax for every device type and requires the construction of complex sequences of regular expression pattern matching.
International patent application, publication number WO 2011/088898 (FEDOR, Szymon, et al (VERIFICATION OF COMPATIBILITY AMONG TELECOMMUNICATION NETWORK FEATURES, Jul. 28, 2011), discloses a method and apparatus for assessing the compatibility of a selected network feature with the network features of an existing telecommunications network comprises providing an abstraction of each network feature in the form of a data model which defines the relationships between any network elements or nodes, software elements and software features required for each network feature.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to address the aforementioned problem.